Comment by MengerSponge
3 hours ago
It's bad manners and a waste of people's time and attention to present previously published work as novel.
Repeating a phrase or two in a document's introduction isn't going to raise flags from any serious people, but copying data, analysis, or large swaths of text? That's a paddlin'.
I think it depends. The popular exposure to this idea, where you can be accused of self-plagiarism for a paper you write for a class, does seem stupid, because obviously your prof hasn't read your paper you wrote in another class and you're not 'wasting' anyone's time.
I can also appreciate that in a "publishing papers as research" context you're completely right.
Course credit is not the same as professional certifications. You can apply past expertise/work to as many different certifications as you can manage.
Submitting previously graded work for a new course wastes your own time. It also wastes the professor's time, because they assigned that writing for you to develop a specific skill, and you're trying to not practice whatever they're trying to teach you.
If you have a perfectly matched essay to the assignment, you should talk to the professor about how the assignment can be adapted.
That makes no sense, either people don't know about the previous work and thus it has clear value. Or they do and they can easily skip it. Beside for a lot of work it be great if you could just literally copy and paste fragments if your previous work to deepen out some reasoning.
I disagree.
I think you are contradicting yourself. If a previous work has been copy and pasted, and a novel reader doesn't know, wouldn't the reader benefit from the option to actually read the previous work as a whole?
All credible authors I read mentioned quotes from earlier works. In fact, that is on the one hand an ego boost as a prolific writer, and also helps sell more copies in case of being purchasable.
Most credible university profs in Germany from the 1990th for example always referenced their former work and mention changes of the context, or in case of a theory, modifications.
Books for example, are reprinted and it has been mentioned whether changes to the content has been done.
Personally I really see no problem, leaving the decision, whether you copied something or not, to the reader.
Many forums have/had policies about not doing cross posting (in different categories). I find this similar.
Yes, maybe from the "plagiarism" angle is not very relevant, but I would prefer not to have a system in which people try to "flood" repositories (journals, etc) with the same thing over and over. People looking for new information, people reviewing will get most of the burden to "keep things clean" while for the poster that is not a problem.
If they don't know about the previous work, they won't know to go there for more. If they do, it doesn't mean they instantly recognize it and know to skip.
Just mark it, it'll take seconds.